Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

June 20, 2016

How American Orthodoxy Turned against Social Dancing

A touchy subject.

Until the 1960s, it was quite common for Orthodox synagogues in the U.S. to hold regular social events featuring mixed dancing, often with tacit approval from their clergymen. By the 1980s, such gatherings had disappeared even from Modern Orthodox synagogues as rabbis reasserted the halakhic prohibitions on social dancing and on public physical contact between the sexes in general. Zev Eleff seeks to explain this transformation:

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